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Was anybody surprised by the report Tuesday from Canada’s environment commissioner that found the Conservative government is falling short on its own modest goals to meet the challenge of climate change?

Certainly not Mark Jaccard, the Simon Fraser University professor, author and consultant to governments who in frustration tried something new on the weekend — getting arrested.

Jaccard took part in a protest on Saturday that blocked the tracks in White Rock to trains from the United States bound for Delta’s Westshore Terminals with coal for export.

Coal is a major source of carbon emissions, but coal that just passes through B.C. or that is mined here and burned elsewhere is not counted as part of our emissions. But since climate change is a global problem, it doesn’t matter where it is burned in terms of its detrimental effect.

In an interview Tuesday, Jaccard said he would rather be working with governments than against them, but became persuaded that their failure to live up to their commitments justified the extraordinary act of offering himself up as a celebrity protester to be handcuffed and marched off by police.

“What do you do when they’re misleading people, when they say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got our promise, we care about the climate, we care about those future generations’ and yet it’s so obvious that they are working very aggressively to get more carbon out of the Earth’s crust that will end up in the atmosphere?”

The report from Scott Vaughan, commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, who is part of the office of the auditor-general, found the federal government doesn’t even have the regulations in place that could lead to meeting the 2009 commitment made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government in Copenhagen to cut greenhouse emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.

The report said, “this looks like Jean Chretien post-Kyoto redux,” said Jaccard. As did the Liberals after signing the Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse emissions, the Conservative government made the commitment and hasn’t done anything since to try to meet it.

“They’re not allowed to say that the government’s not telling the truth, but I guess I can,” he said.

Similarly, since the departure of former premier Gordon Campbell, the provincial government has lost most of its zeal for actively pursuing emission reductions.

B.C. has a legislated target of a 33-per-cent reduction from 2007 levels by 2020. There are also interim targets meant to show that we are on track, the first of which is a six-per-cent reduction by this year, 2012.

“Christy Clark and her government have just gone silent on those interim years,” Jaccard said.

But even before Campbell left, concern in B.C. over climate change has been trumped — as it has in the federal arena — by the rush to cash in on oil and gas production.

“You don’t meet those promises if you are trying to accelerate the rate at which you extract hydrocarbons from the Earth’s crust, whether it’s oilsands, coal, natural gas or whatever.”

While the Liberals under Clark haven’t officially strayed from the course set under Campbell, climate change has slipped as a priority. The climate action plan is no longer prominently displayed on the province’s website. It’s still there, but a couple of layers down.

Last week, the co-chair of the committee crafting the Liberal platform for the next provincial election mused that it might be time to phase out the carbon tax, which has been the most visible aspect of the government’s climate-change strategy.

Liberal MLA Bill Bennett argued that B.C. would be better off spending money on mitigating the effects of climate change than on trying to prevent it from happening.

Meanwhile, the environment commissioner reported Tuesday that the Harper government hasn’t even bothered to figure out what it would cost to meet its commitments.

So it is in no position to judge whether it would be worth the effort.

All of which leads to the conclusion that with both the Harper and the Clark governments, the strategy on climate change, if you can call it that, is to continue giving lip service to the cause and not much else.

From a short-term political perspective, they may be making the right choice. Voters have shown little interest in environmental issues of late. The consequences in the longer term are less certain. If the climate scientists are right, the mitigation that may be needed could be a lot more expensive than the prevention would have been.

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